God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Such deadlock placed enormous strain on resources and morale. In late December 1097, acute food shortages prompted a major foraging expedition south up the Orontes valley towards al-Bara, only for Bohemund and Robert of Flanders to stumble across an allied relief force from Damascus and Homs led by Duqaq of Damascus and his atabeg Tughtegin.¹⁹ Duqaq withdrew only after inflicting heavy casualties, mainly among the westerners’ infantry, and preventing the collection of much-needed forage, a failure that threatened the Christians with starvation. Supplies were sought from as far away as Cyprus, Rhodes and Crete, but famine loomed; prices soared; hunger claimed men and horses. The army’s debilitation reduced the number of volunteers to conduct other vital foraging sorties. The expedition appeared trapped in a vice, unable to make military progress and incapable of feeding itself. Misery and fear led to desertion; Peter the Hermit and William the Carpenter of Melun were caught trying to flee. Even Bohemund contemplated abandoning the enterprise as he saw men and horses in his modest company dying of hunger.²⁰ The presence in Syrian waters of friendly shipping made escape easier.

To counter collapsing morale, in January, the papal legate, Adhemar of Le Puy, instituted penitential fasting, intercessory prayers, processions and alms-giving for the laity, with the clergy celebrating masses and singing psalms. Communal participation in familiar religious ceremonies played on the psychological requirement for the beleaguered Christians to shake off fatalism, lethargy and inertia by involving the ordinary soldier and pilgrim in active contributions to the army’s destiny. With a simultaneous secular crackdown on law and order within the army, the revivalist message was reinforced by the removal of all women from the camps, wives included, the association of sex with divine disapproval being widely promoted by the western clerical establishment.²¹ Ritual public humiliations and punishment for adulterers were staged to underscore the evils of sexual licence, the culprits stripped naked and flogged in front of the whole army. More mundanely, an appeal for alms helped pool resources. The leaders, who reached decisions through regular councils, formed a confraternity, a sworn association which could distribute donations without complications of conflicting lordships or loyalties. The funding of the siege forts and a bridge of boats across the Orontes was organized in this way, as were payments to Tancred for him to blockade Antioch’s southern gate. To meet the crisis of January 1098, Raymond of Toulouse paid 500 marks into the common fund to help knights replace their horses.²² To further reassure their followers, the leaders swore oaths not to abandon the siege. These measures emphasized the particular corporate identity that had grown through shared experience and crisis. Correspondence to the west in October and November 1097 proclaimed that God fought for ‘the army of the Lord’; in January, the bishops in the army recorded the assistance in battle of the ‘knights of Christ’, the Greek saints George, Theodore, Demetrius and Blaise.²³